Are we leaving money on the table?

That’s a question every fundraiser asks themselves on repeat!

While there’s no way for us to know every organisation’s potential, chances are the answer is ‘yes’. This is where creating targeted supporter journeys can make a transformative difference.

Notes Robert Friend, seasoned charity executive and Eventgroove solutions specialist, “ROI could be 20–30% higher than your current activation level with supporter journey management. This is because we are being very personal and matching the pitch with the prospect, and building supporter relationships in an organised way.”

Robert recently hosted a webinar entitled,  “Understanding the Donor Journey: Insights and Best Practices for Fundraising Growth.” In it, he discusses the impact of storytelling on the supporter experience, outlines journey mapping and how to create targeted supporter personas, and shares lots of examples. Watch the entire webinar below, and review our recap of the information Robert shares in the rest of this article.

A supporter’s journey is essentially a highly individualised, guided roadmap upon which existing, lapsed, and potential supporters travel to become engaged advocates for your cause. It’s about building a relationship and connection with your supporters.

“The supporter journey is a series of personal interactions and more important than any single touchpoint experience you’ll give. It’s an opportunity to galvanise and drive your community. Consider this—if we reach people on a personalised basis, it will connect us to the work that we do in a special way and drive our community into action.” —Robert Friend, Eventgroove Solutions

It all starts with getting to know your community of existing supporters, potential donors, and corporate partners through research and data review.

Is your audience involved? Engaged? How many times a year do they see or interact with your charity’s projects or programmes? What motivates them? What do or don’t they like? Put yourself in their shoes and gain an understanding of what drives their core beliefs and desires. That information allows us to manage change and growth through supporter journey management.

After you research and gather information, you then need to identify the audience for which you’ll create target supporter personas.

Determine predictable patterns and behaviours of your primary and secondary audience. Prizm is a great tool for this. It allows you to overlay the Prizm database of personas against your organisation’s database to segment and understand your audience.

The purpose of supporter personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your charity’s key audience segments. These representations should be based on qualitative and some quantitative user research. Remember that effective personas describe real people with backgrounds, goals, and values.

1. Review goals.
2. Gather research. Get to know your community through data and research. Put yourself in the shoes of existing, lapsed, and prospective supporters to understand what drives their core beliefs and desires.
3. List supporter touchpoints and engagement channels. How do we reach our community, and what are the channels through which we do it? Do we use social media? Letters? Email? Tailor how you communicate with each supporter persona.
4. Develop an empathy map. Empathy mapping allows us to put ourselves in our supporters’ shoes, which ultimately drives giving.
5. Complete an affinity diagram. This allows you to create the story of each targeted supporter segment.
6. Sketch the supporter journey. This can be on a napkin or the wall of your office, but it must be done! It’s a super-powerful step because it brings your charity’s supporter journeys to life.
7. Share the journey map. Share what you’ve created with your charity, board, and team!